EC2 Continuous Deployment: Managing the build process

Note: This is the third article in the series on continuous deployment. If you want to start with the overview, go here.

We can now build our application manually, but need to automate the actual build process. For this I’ll be using the Hudson Extensible continuous integration engine. I’ve been using CruiseControl for many years, and while it does the job, I’ve been annoyed enough that I’ll try something new.

EC2 Continuous Deployment: Building the software

Note: This is the second article in the series on continuous deployment. If you want to start with the overview, go here.

The app we’ll deploy will just be a simple “Hello World” application, written using Lift, a very nice Scala web framework. I will not go into any Scala or Lift specifics in this article, but will  show how to build it.

EC2 Continuous Deployment: Hello world

I’m a strong believer in agile development and one of the biggest benefits I see is to get working software in front of the customer as fast as possible. The term ‘working’ may mean different things to different people but it does imply that there’s some level of quality that needs to be  achieved.

Many developers consider their job done when they’ve committed a feature and the build is successfull (you do run some sort of CI don’t you?). But this does not bring the software in front of the customer. In many places, doing a production deployment is a large, manual process with lots of opportunities for mistakes, which means that deployments either take longer than necessary or happen infrequently.

Timothy Fitz wrote an interesting entry about Continuous Deployment, basically deploying to production after each commit. While I don’t think deploying to production after every commit is workable for everybody, the idea of actually deploying the latest code automatically is very valuable. This article series will cover the basics on how to get a simple software product deployed automatically.

Sharing music library from a Linux server to iTunes

With the new entry into the world of OS X, one of the first things I decided to do was to get access to my music library stored on a Linux server. I know a lot of people that are hooked completely on Apple with iPods/iPhones/MacBooks/Airport etc, and they don’t understand why I have to go trough all this trouble when the Apple stuff “just works”. And to that I answer:

• I have a fairly high quality stereo setup hooked up to my server and can easily hear the difference between compressed formats (MP3, AAC) and loss less formats (like Flac)
• We have numerous devices with different format support (Portable MP3 players, mobile phones, windows clients etc). So using a neutral, open, DRM-free format seems likes the best bet to get all this going.
• I never buy music from the iTunes music store (until they provide songs in a lossless format anyway)

New iMac in the house

So I finally jumped on the Apple bandwagon and bought an iMac (got a good deal on the previous gen 20″ 2.66GHz model). This is primarily for my wife and kids to use for some World of Warcraft, email, web surfing etc. But let’s see if I can’t squeeze some time in in  front of it to do a little experimenting  with Xcode for iPhone development

It had to happen….

Yes, I created a blog. Time will tell if any information will show up here